Every time I see these marketing ploys, the lights on my nonsense-detector begin blinking furiously.

Why? Because virtually nothing we eat, drink or wear is actually natural, if by “natural” we mean the way nature made it.

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Take that loaf of organic, whole-grain bread, for instance. It's a fine, healthy food, but not because nature made it that way. The wheat that went into it is no more like nature intended than my dachshund, Fiona, is like nature made a wolf. We humans genetically modified that wheat thousands of years ago by hybridizing several species of naturally occurring grasses, then selectively breeding the new hybrid for bigger seeds, thinner seed coverings, a more erect growth form and retention of seeds on the plant, as opposed to their previous habit of breaking loose from the stem to be dispersed by the wind.

And you probably wouldn't recognize, and certainly wouldn't want to eat, the tiny, tough-kerneled natural ancestor of corn.

One of my favorite phrases is “all-natural, corn-fed beef,” which describes a non-natural animal (the animal from which we created the cow is extinct) being fed a non-natural diet that it doesn't naturally eat. You could point out similar things about most “natural” products we use.

Nature also gets a lot of unwarranted credit for providing us benefits. Clearly, it does so, but mostly by accident.

As a former field biologist, I've been fortunate enough to spend many months living in some of the loveliest parts of the world, from tropical islands and savannas to alpine forests.

One thing nature teaches you (or as you would learn in any course on biological evolution) is that species are designed to be beneficial to themselves, not us. The various and sophisticated ways they do so are the core of nature's wonder to me.

But let's not forget that in addition to incredible beauty, nature has given us the plague bacillus, intestinal worms, leeches, ticks and poison ivy — in fact, most of the world's great poisons, such as cyanide, strychnine and curare — as well as a host of insecticides. As biochemist Bruce Ames likes to point out, 99 percent of the world's insecticides are produced by plants in self-defense.

The genius of humanity, you might argue, is in seeing the potential of something in nature and figuring out how to modify it for human use. We have taken one of the world's deadliest poisons, botulinum toxin, and turned it into a cosmetic product, Botox.

And some proto-farmer, 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, considered the energy that grass seeds had stored for next year's germination and suspected it might provide energy — that is, food — for him (or her). Then, by selectively breeding that grass, clever farmers over the millennia produced the whole grain wheat in your loaf of bread today.